Application of Simple and Hybrid Local Search Heuristics for the Long-Term Optimization of Pavement Maintenance Strategies at the Network Level

Infrastructure maintenance is one of the major issues of public agencies. Either insufficient maintenance investment or inefficient maintenance strategies can deal to high economic expenses in the long term. Recent figures illustrate these facts: budget needed to bring America's roads to good condition doubles the current spending; and late maintenance has been proved to triple rehabilitation costs. Moreover, users are increasingly demanding in terms of quality, comfort, and safety. Infrastructure managements in general and pavement managers in particular, need tools to help them in the decision making process in order to maximize the long term effectiveness of maintenance strategies subject to budgetary and technical restrictions. When dealing with large pavement networks, genetic algorithms have extensively been applied to solve this problem. However, little attention has been paid to local search heuristics, which have been proved to outperform genetic algorithms in similar combinatorial optimization problems. This paper seeks to explore the suitability of applying local search heuristic algorithms to optimize the long term effectiveness of maintenance strategies at the network level. For this purpose, two local search heuristics (Simulated Annealing and a hybrid Simulated Annealing-Greedy Search) were implemented and applied in an illustrative case study. Mean values of long term performance obtained with the hybrid method are proved to be statistically higher than those of the simple method. In broad terms, the hybrid method dealt to more efficient and robust results than the simple Simulated Annealing, resulting in an efficient method for the optimization of maintenance strategies at the network level.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD20 Pavement Maintenance. Alternate title: Application of Simple and Hybrid Local Search Heuristics for Long-Term Optimization of Pavement Maintenance Strategies at the Network Level
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Torres-Machí, Cristina
  • Yepes, Victor
  • Pellicer, Eugenio
  • 0000-0001-9100-0644
  • Chamorro, Alondra
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 11p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Algorithms; Case studies; Heuristic methods; Hybrid simulation; Networks; Optimization; Pavement maintenance; Pavement management systems; Simulated annealing
• Uncontrolled Terms: Greedy algorithms; Hybrid methods
• Geographic Terms: Spain
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Pavements; Planning and Forecasting; I60: Maintenance; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515687
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-2247
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 24 2014 5:00PM